Miss Hansford was a strong supporter of the W. C. T. U., and had less sympathy for a man easily affected than for one who could take quarts with no bad result. So far as Jack was concerned, whether he could take much or little, did not matter. He was better out of the way, and she said so, with sundry uncomplimentary remarks concerning him, while Paul defended him. The only subject on which he and Miss Hansford ever openly differed was the luckless Jack, whom Paul declared a pretty good fellow, but for one fault, while she denounced him as wholly bad. There was no reason why Elithe should be interested in him; and yet she was, and, after Paul had gone, she asked her aunt why Clarice did not try to reform him instead of turning against him. “There’s no reform in him,” her aunt replied. “I know Jack Percy,—a bad egg when he was a boy, and a worse one now he is a man, I dare say, though I haven’t known much of him lately. Such as he can’t reform.” “He must be pretty bad, then,” Elithe said, thinking of Mr. Pennington as he was in the miners’ camp and as he was when she saw him last. She spoke of him to her aunt, who asked when she had finished, “Is he anything to you?” “To me? No; nothing but a friend. We all liked him. We couldn’t help it,” was Elithe’s answer, given with no change of voice or color. She was untouched; but Miss Hansford was not so sure of the man. He could not be insensible to Elithe’s beauty,—no man could. It had impressed Paul, engaged though he was; it must have impressed Mr. Pennington, who might appear on the scene at any moment, and Miss Hansford’s bones began to tell her that trouble would come from Elithe’s reformed friend. She was studying Elithe carefully, and as yet could find no fault with her. She neither sang, nor whistled, nor slatted her things; she was so helpful about the house, so sunny and bright and willing that her aunt wondered how she had ever lived without her, and began to dread the time when she would be gone. There was no Potter blood in her, she decided, unless it were manifest in the flower-like beauty of her face and the supple grace of her figure. So much she conceded to the Potters. For the rest Elithe was all Hansford. “I hain’t an atom of fault to find with her, nor her bringin’ up,” she said to a neighbor. “Nothing at all, except that she’s never read the Bible through, and she a minister’s daughter. But what can you expect of a ’Piscopal who puts the Prayer Book before everything. She knows that about by heart, same as I did once.” Reading the Bible through was one of Miss Hansford’s tests of religious training, and she had learned with surprise that Elithe was remiss in this respect. “Never read the Bible through! My soul! What’s your father been thinking about?” she said, when Elithe confessed her shortcoming. “Why, I’d read it through before I was a dozen years old,—five chapters every Sunday and three every week day will do it in a year.”